Somewhere between buying a house, starting a company, and settling into a new life in North Carolina, I lost touch with something pretty important. You’d think that the rather jarring events of the last few years would remind me that everything is temporary and life is a game of riding the cycles, but no. There …
Anyone who has ever quit anything knows all too well that it’s never just about the cessation of the thing. It’s about what drives us to the precipice, and what we discover beyond it.
I teased the book cover last time. I told you how I saw it and wept because it was perfect. I am not expecting you to have the same reaction, but know that this cover is deeply special to me. The model is someone who played a big role in my life and who totally embodied the spirit of HALF WILD.
And there’s the first-day-back jitters of seeing my teammates. Some of them I’ve met before, and it will be a nice little reunion. Others I’ve known for years simply as faces in a box on a Zoom screen. As we come together for the first time, what will we talk about? What is the proper response to that simple inquiry: “How are you?”
I used the lockdown as my personal creative vortex and compiled the road trips, therapy sessions, business trips, panic attacks and all the rest into a book. And that book was published in June 2022 and is available on Amazon/Etsy now! What follows are the first 2 chapters.
Two boulder-sized milestones – stacked on top of one another, heaped on top of me. The kind of life-altering moments that can exhaust your emotional faculties so completely that you need a few weeks of alternating deep tissue massages and tear-soaked therapy sessions just to get back to baseline. And I got a twofer over one long weekend.
It’s never really about the things. Delightful distractions, the leather smells rich and the cashmere feels soft but after the novelty of the luxury wears off, we’re all still just electric meatsuits traversing a watery orb, bumping up against each other trying to make sense of it all.
I finally found a natural counterbalance for all that dogged seeking. It didn’t matter if I was shopping in Scotland or sipping coffee in Savannah, the highlight of every trip was always the same, and somehow perfectly unique each time. Perhaps driven by a subconscious urge to recharge, I learned to ground myself with microdoses of actual human connection.
So while life progressed in beautiful ways, sometimes working on that book felt like wasting time. I struggled with stepping into the past and spending late nights regurgitating old timelines that almost don’t feel real anymore.
For three years I avoided stagnation by piling on more chaos, traveling, burning through my savings, ending up back at my parents’ house to let my bank account refill. Yesterday, I sent 50,000 carefully culled and crafted words to an editor with the intention of turning them into a book. Those two things could not have coexisted…